By Greg Neumann
When you spend a week listening to fintech representatives, consultants and other technology experts talk about the future of banking, it would be easy to come away with the impression that financial institutions must act now to implement the latest and greatest innovations or face impending doom.
That was the impression at least some took away from the plethora of financial technology sessions at Bank Director’s 2026 Acquire or Be Acquired Conference (AOBA), held this week in Phoenix, Arizona.
Guy Stovall III has served as the CEO of NewFirst National Bank, the $944 million subsidiary of NewFirst Financial Group, based in El Campo, Texas, for 39 years. He primarily attended the sessions on technology, and is still trying to wrap his head around everything he heard.
“All this stuff sounds so urgent,” Stovall says. “There are so many things that you can do and you could do, and I’m way past the glitz and the whistles and the bells. It’s like, ‘What’s the fundamental thing that we need to be doing?’”
There is no doubt that financial institutions face a number of pressures in 2026. Innovations in artificial intelligence, digital currency and payments have advanced at a time when the regulatory environment is much more friendly to fintechs, crypto firms and other nonbanks seeking bank charters. How banks handle that combination of factors will be crucial to their growth, but there don’t appear to be firm answers on just how soon they have to act.
Analyzing the Pressure Points
If there was one issue that financial institution leaders could not ignore at the conference, it was artificial intelligence.
Thomas Michaud, CEO of the investment bank Keefe, Bruyette and Woods, made that point very clear in his session. He said the megabanks like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. wouldn’t be investing billions of dollars in AI if it wasn’t going to be transformational.
Ravi Nemalikanti, chief product and technology officer at the software and consultancy firm Abrigo, said banks and credit unions have to realize AI is already transforming their industry. “If you’re an organization or institution that is not using AI, you’ll start to see that in customer experience,” he said. “I think over time we’ll see that the performance gap between institutions that use AI versus [those that] don’t use AI is going to be very, very clear.”
Warning sounds about the threat of stablecoin also rang out across the conference. Several experts say it will not only become the preferred form of instant payments for businesses, but it could also drain money out of the banking system, as nonbanks hold more and more stablecoin deposits. Under the GENIUS Act, which passed last summer, a U.S. regulated stablecoin will be backed dollar-for-dollar by U.S. Treasuries. The banking lobby is currently advocating in Congress to ensure the companies holding stablecoin deposits are not allowed to offer interest on them, or any rewards that look like yields.
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To see the full article featuring Abrigo, visit FinXTech, “Is Technology Causing an Existential Crisis in Banking?“
